The Verge is turning off their commenting system for the summer:

From the very start, community has been at the heart of The Verge — we are unique among almost every major media brand of our size in having a vocal, engaged audience that cares deeply about what we cover, why we cover it, and how we do it. The Verge audience knows our staff and genuinely cares about us. They write us long posts about ways to improve the site and what they like, and when they leave we get heartfelt breakup letters. It’s terrific, and intense.

And sometimes it gets too intense. What we’ve found lately is that the tone of our comments (and some of our commenters) is getting a little too aggressive and negative — a change that feels like it started with GamerGate and has steadily gotten worse ever since. It’s hard for us to do our best work in that environment, and it’s even harder for our staff to hang out with our audience and build the relationships that led to us having a great community in the first place.

That’s a bad feedback loop, and we want to stop it. So we’re going to call timeout for a while and turn comments off by default on all posts for the next few weeks. It’s going to be a super chill summer.

Why stop at the end of the summer? Turn comments off permanently. There are very few sites where I’ve seen mostly positive comments (Asymco and The Loop come to mind), but comment threads are usually filled with shit-talking fanbois, trolls and negativity. Commenting systems encourage reactionary replies with little critical thinking behind them.

I decided a long time ago to kill comments on this site, in part from John Gruber’s comment-less approach on Daring Fireball. I believe his reason for not having comments was something along the lines of, “I want to own every pixel on my site.” That resonated with me.

If you read something someone wrote and have thoughts of your own that support/refute it, launch your own website and spend some time formulating a cohesive response. Then sit on it and reread it. Then post it.

Fuck comments.

Seth Godin:

The Wright Brothers decided to solve the hardest problem of flight first.

It’s so tempting to work on the fun, the urgent or even the controversial parts of a problem.

There are really good reasons to do the hard part first, though. In addition to not wasting time in meetings about logos, you’ll end up getting the rest of your design right if you do the easy parts last.

This is great advice for planning Kickstarter projects and avoiding the potential pitfalls associated with them.

I’ve been using Apple Music since it launched yesterday. It’s interesting. I’m not sure if I’ll be signing up after the 3-month trial is over, but so far I like the recommendations it gives me.

The playlists under “For You” are good, but I’ve been playing around with the ability to create a “station” based on a track I’m listening too. I want recommendations based on my music library. So far, the stations Apple has been creating are good. I noticed it will play me a combination of songs already in my library and songs from iTunes.

The user interface on my iPhone is on the complex side. I can figure it out without too much trouble, but I’m not sure non-nerds will be able to. Part of this is due to the density of functionality Apple has packed into the Music app. There’s a lot going on.

I used to be able to double-tap on the album artwork to display the album track list, but that doesn’t work anymore. I have to hit the 3 dots in the bottom right of my iPhone and then tap on the track/album/artist at the top of the modal menu. Weird. Confusing.

When I go to My Music and switch to ‘Songs’ I no longer have a ‘Shuffle’ button at the top of the list. I miss that button. I’ll probably get over it.

I also no longer have the ability to reorganize the bottom menu. Right now ‘My Music’ is the last button. Apple is assuming I’m always going to want their streaming service to be my first priority. I’d like ‘My Music’ to be the first menu item. Please.

iTunes is a whole other story. It continues the long tradition of being a labyrinthine, confusing desktop application. As with the iOS Music app, I can figure it out, I just wonder how many regular people can. Since iOS is where all the money and consumer eyes are these days, it’s not the end of the world.

Now back to my music.

With Steve Jobs gone, Apple no longer makes lickable buttons. Sorry.

Apple nav bars compiled by James Dempsey

via Quipsologies

Robert Zemeckis is not down with anyone remaking Back to the Future:

“I mean, to me, that’s outrageous. Especially since it’s a good movie. It’s like saying ‘Let’s remake Citizen Kane. Who are we going to get to play Kane?’ What folly, what insanity is that? Why would anyone do that?”

Hahaha. Take it easy, Zemecky.

I liked Back to the Future like anyone else, but it ain’t no Citizen Kane.

Talk about delusions of grandeur.

This week Michael and Bryan discuss the summer, hearing loss, brown noise, ten years of podcasting in iTunes, Cavs-vs-Warriors, stadiums & cities, OS X El Capitan, edits on DailyExhaust.com, martinis & breasts, the Confederate Flag, and the power of symbols.

Listen Now

—John Waters Commencement Address – RISD 2015

via swissmiss

via vintage everyday

Moore’s Law keeps going. Some experts say it will eventually be impossible to keep doubling every 18 months. Even if that happens, one thing we know is that this wouldn’t matter as much as it might have before. With the ubiquity of smartphones, powerful computing technology is now in the hands of the masses. The “computer for the rest of us” that the advertisements for the Macintosh had promised since 1984 has arrived. And that’s why Moore’s Law is no longer enough to make customers happy.

—John Maeda, Why Design Matters More than Moore

No shit, the original Moleskin launched in 1997?

The Moleskine notebook emerged at a moment when it looked increasingly like the long-promised “paperless office” would become a reality, with technologies like word-processing software, the Internet, laptops, handheld devices, and other innovations rendering printed matter obsolete. The original Moleskine journal was launched in Milan, in 1997, the same year the first Palm digital planner was introduced; its designer, Maria Sebregondi, told me that she was aiming to create the ultimate travel journal for an emerging class of “global nomads.” But, within a few years, the notebook had been adopted by a totally different class of user: M.I.T. students and academics, tech-company founders, and other high-achieving entrepreneurs, all of whom prized it for its simplicity and efficiency.

I thought the Moleskin was much older than that.

John Biggs sees the tipping point for self-publishing coming soon:

I’ve gone all in with the Indie publishing movement – I’ve released three books myself and I’ve done relatively well with all of them. But the fact still remains that the entire business of books is stacked against the Indie author. While the tools are far simpler than they have ever been, the perception that an Indie book is an inferior product, at least in the eyes of established media, is strong. But that’s about to change.

Progress has been made, but there’s still more work to be done.

Gorgeous photos by Saul Leitner

via YIMMY YAYO

Yes, Dylann Roof is racist, but where does this racism come from?

David Niose says anti-intellectualism:

And even though it may seem counter-intuitive, anti-intellectualism has little to do with intelligence. We know little about the raw intellectual abilities of Dylann Roof, but we do know that he is an ignorant racist who willfully allowed irrational hatred of an entire demographic to dictate his actions. Whatever his IQ, to some extent he is a product of a culture driven by fear and emotion, not rational thinking, and his actions reflect the paranoid mentality of one who fails to grasp basic notions of what it means to be human.

What Americans rarely acknowledge is that many of their social problems are rooted in the rejection of critical thinking or, conversely, the glorification of the emotional and irrational. What else could explain the hyper-patriotism (link is external) that has many accepting an outlandish notion that America is far superior to the rest of the world? Love of one’s country is fine, but many Americans seem to honestly believe that their country both invented and perfected the idea of freedom, that the quality of life here far surpasses everywhere else in the world.

The whole article is worth a read.

This is the privilege of whiteness: While a terrorist may be white, his violence is never based in his whiteness. A white terrorist has unique, complicated motives that we will never comprehend. He can be a disturbed loner or a monster. He is either mentally ill or pure evil. The white terrorist exists solely as a dyad of extremes: Either he is humanized to the point of sympathy or he is so monstrous that he almost becomes mythological. Either way, he is never indicative of anything larger about whiteness, nor is he ever a garden-variety racist. He represents nothing but himself. A white terrorist is anything that frames him as an anomaly and separates him from the long, storied history of white terrorism.

I’m always struck by this hesitance not only to name white terrorism but to name whiteness itself during acts of racial violence. In a recent New York Times article on the history of lynching, the victims are repeatedly described as black. Not once, however, are the violent actors described as they are: white. Instead, the white lynch mobs are simply described as “a group of men” or “a mob.” In an article about racial violence, this erasure of whiteness is absurd. The race of the victims is relevant, but somehow the race of the killers is incidental. If we’re willing to admit that race is a reason blacks were lynched, why are we unwilling to admit that race is a reason whites lynched them?

In his remarks following the Charleston shooting, President Obama mentioned whiteness only once — in a quotation from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. intended to encourage interracial harmony. Obama vaguely acknowledged that “this is not the first time that black churches have been attacked” but declined to state who has attacked these churches. His passive language echoes this strange vagueness, a reluctance to even name white terrorism, as if black churches have been attacked by some disembodied force, not real people motivated by a racist ideology whose roots stretch past the founding of this country.

—White Terrorism Is as Old as America

via The Made Shop